am/fm

[Taka Mizutani]

Pioneer. The radios have pretty good tuners in them- check the specs. Way
better than Alpine,
Eclipse, Sony, etc. My Premier pulls in stations quite well, better than a
lot of stock radios.

A couple things w/ regard to Audis- if the car has an in-glass antenna, you
have to correctly hook
up the amplifier, otherwise you'll get pretty much zero reception with any
radio. That's not exactly straightforward-
I had to do it at least twice or three times to get it right.

I've had fairly high-end "professionals" not do this correctly as well, so
it's not just me. :-)

Also, if you have metallic tint, that can kill the reception of an in-glass
antenna- big no-no. If you must have tint
with an in-glass antenna, you have to do either dye or ceramic.

IME, having an external antenna vs. in-glass makes all the difference, esp.
if it's a roof-mounted antenna like
on the New Beetle, Golf, A4 Avant, etc. I don't really know how the new
shark-fin antennas fare as I do not have
enough seat time in those cars to evaluate the radio.

I missed the original post, so I don't know what kind of car this radio is
for.

Taka

On 4/5/07, thejimrose <thejimrose at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> IME installing car audio for a few years the typical reception of the
> aftermarket radios was dismal. we also sold high end home audio [krell,
> wilson, conrad johnson, theil, threshold, b+w, etc etc etc] so we had a
> few
> hardcore fm guys in the store. every now and then we'd see an oem radio
> that
> had great fm on the whole they are decent. however as fm is not sought
> after
> by people buying aftermarket car radios, it's an afterthought at best.
>
> i can't recall a single unit - alpine, clarion, kenwood, eclipse, etc that
> had a model with a decent tuner in it. i have a 700$ top line kenwood with
> no onboard amp and an external power supply [in a car radio!] and it's
> tuner
> SUCKS. if you could pull local stations w/out noise you were doing alright
> with the aftermarket. some of our customers actually had us put the oem
> radios back in over this, and deal with line conversions to get the rest
> of
> the system [amps, etc] working.
>
> double check your connections - and you might have some ground noise
> seeping
> in. the car radio typically gets grounded in 3 places; antenna [where the
> antenna body mounts to the fender usually], wiring harness ground and the
> metal/metal chassis connection bolting it to the dash. lifting one or more
> of these can help. plastic nuts/bolts, duct tape, 3m strip caulk, rubber
> washers are your friends. =) IIRC my preference was to run the wired
> chassis
> ground from the head  to a clean piece of metal in the dash [make sure the
> dash support metal you wire to is not isolated from the chassis] with as
> short a wire as possible and have this be the only ground.
>
> you can pull the radio and antenna and try different combo's with them
> 'loose' in the car to see if you get an improvement.
>
> GL!
> jim
>
> >>I have installed an Alpine 9855, and I have exactly the same problem.
> I made no change between the old (Sony) and the new radio connections,
> but the reception is absolutely useless. I have not looked into the
> problem yet, but I sure hope that the radio is not THAT bad.
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